THE USE OF PERSIAN LOANWORDS IN ALBANIAN: FOCUSING ON THE REGISTERS OF THE LOW LEVEL OF FORMALITY
THE USE OF PERSIAN LOANWORDS IN ALBANIAN: FOCUSING ON THE REGISTERS OF THE LOW LEVEL OF FORMALITY

Summary/Abstract: This study addresses the use of Persian loanwords in today's Albanian language, focusing on registers with a low level of formality. Persian (Farsi) had an extensive presence in the culture of the Ottoman Empire, which for almost five centuries ruled the Balkan region, where Albanians lived as well. Thus, intercultural relations were established between Albanians and Persians, but with the mediation of the Ottoman Empire. In this way, a large number of Persian words penetrated the Albanian language, many of which, even after many attempts to replace them with Albanian words, have wide use in various registers of this language. Our study addresses the shift of Persian words from high to low-level of registers of formality. This study is conducted using two corpora. The first corpus consists of the lyrics of folk songs, as the genre of the lower level of formality. The second corpus consists of interviews with 100 people interviewed within the project "Oral History of Kosovo". The analysis of the use of this part of the Albanian lexicon was carried out on the basis of the theory of corpus linguistics, the theory of languages in contact and the sociolinguistic approach to language registers. The study relies on multi-functionality and linguistic pluralism, on the basis of which the functionalization of Persian words has been researched and used in different styles.

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